Saturday, May 13, 2017

Hitting the Motherload right down the street from home

I need to go to more garage sales. That is the only conclusion I can draw from what happened early this morning after going to one about 2 blocks away from my house. As one might expect, I went there in search of video games. I usually don't have much luck at garage sales but, you do get surprised every once in a while. Today was one of those glorious surprises.

There were also dozens of DVD's being sold for a Dollar each. I picked up a copy of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It's a good action flick and I never got around to adding that to my massive movie collection over the years. Who knows how that one slipped through the cracks but, it did. The Homeowner had a few old PC titles on the table, many of which I had already and others I just didn't want. That didn't stop me from buying yet another copy of Ultimate Doom for Windows 95. Always nice to have back-up copies of that game.

I asked the homeowner if they had anything else they'd be willing to sell. He brought out an old milk crate with a 1980 4-switch model Atari 2600, lots of controllers and 78 cartridges! I have never had a 1980 4-switch model before. This nice little score cost me $40. Some of these cartridges are fairly rare and could fetch a nice price on the Resellers market, if I were willing to sell.

Today's score also brings the number of Atari 2600 consoles in my collection to 8 and 242 individual cartridges! (Assuming that they all work...) There are a LOT of duplicates here but, that's OK. They will just become more stock for the retro game store that I want to open someday. A retro game store that is NOT well-stocked with Atari stuff is not a very good retro game store. The demand may have died down a lot over the last 10 years or so but, it is still there.

Here's the list of the cartridges that I got today...

Adventure (Text label)

Air-Sea Battle (Text label)

Amidar (Label needs work.)

Armor Ambush (M Network game)

Asteroids (Sears version)

Barnstorming

Basketball

Battlezone

Berzerk

Bowling

California Games

Centipede

Chopper Command

Circus Atari

Combat (Picture label)

Crackpots

Crossbow

Crystal Castles

Decathalon

Dig Dug

Donkey Kong (Coleco-made cartridge)

Donkey Kong Jr. (Red label)

Dragonfire

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Bleeech!)

Fishing Derby

Football

Football RealSports Soccer

Freeway

Frogger

Galaxian

Ghostbusters

Grand Prix

Haunted House

Ice Hockey

Jungle Hunt

Keystone Kapers

Kung-Fu Master

M.A.S.H.

Maze Craze

Missile Command

Moonsweeper (Blue Label Imagic game)

Mouse Trap

Night Driver

Pac-Man (Sears version)

Pitfall!

Pong Sports

Q*Bert

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Rampage

RealSports Baseball

RealSports Boxing

RealSports Football

RealSports Volleyball

Riddle of the Sphinx

River Raid

River Raid II

Robot Tank

Sea Hunt

Skiing

Super Challenge Baseball (M Network game)

Space Cavern (Label needs work.)

Space Invaders (Text Label)

Stampede

Starmaster

Superman (2 copies)

Target Fun

Tennis

Towering Inferno

Tron Deadly Discs (M Network game)

Vanguard

Venture

Warlords

Winter Games

Yars' Revenge

There's also 3 M Network cartridges that don't have labels on them anymore. However, I have a lot of loose labels that came with these games so, I should be able to figure out what they are during the testing today. Also, I probably won't include that damned E.T. cartridge in my final manifest. That little plastic slice of PURE EVIL will be used for target practice instead.

Such a glorious site, even if I know there's an E.T. cartridge buried in there somewhere...

And now to find more shelving for these additional cartridges and make room in the Game Room of DOOM...

- Lord Publius

UPDATE: 1440 Hours CST

I have now tested the motherload of old games I got from the garage sale earlier today.

The Doom game for PC worked. The Atari 2600 console did too. However, only 20 of the 78 cartridges that did come in this bundle have been made to work so far. The rest are going to need a LOT of Deoxit to remove oxidation on the edge connectors of their logic boards, if they ever work again. The stuff that does work is being added to my manifest as you read this now. Adding these 20 carts to the 2600 collection brings the total number of cartridges for that system up to 184. The closest competitor is the NES, with a total of 146.